THE WORLD | World in Brief / WASHINGTON, D.C.

Report critical of Iraq contractor

The Pentagon's largest contractor in Iraq, Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, routinely hid information about its work from the public by marking it as proprietary when it wasn't, a U.S. government report said.

The company's actions were an abuse of federal contracting rules designed to protect proprietary information, said the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Information as fundamental as the number of meals being served to U.S. soldiers was labeled "not releasable to the public," the report said.